How the digital marketing assistant will grow your business

In this article you will read about the different options to practice digital marketing and how smart software helps your business to grow. If you are starting out in digital marketing or if you are dissatisfied with the way things are going at the moment, you are going to explore new options . The choices you can make to perform better will be discussed in this article. In addition, you will read about:

1. ‍Growing with digital marketing: the options‍
2. Can you do digital marketing yourself?‍
3. How software helps with digital marketing‍
4. The digital marketing assistant

Growing with digital marketing: the options

Whether you are starting out or experienced in digital marketing, you will always need to keep optimising your campaigns to stay ahead of your competition. Finding the right strategy takes time, knowledge and requires expertise to execute. An important question is: at what point should you focus on the right channel? Channels such as organic (SEO) or paid advertising (SEA) ?

There are several options to grow your business via digital marketing, such as:

• Training; train yourself to be an expert
• Work with a freelancer
• Hire a digital marketing agency
• Use smart software

Training

Educating yourself to become an expert takes quite a bit of time, concentration and perseverance. But once you have the knowledge it can be super valuable for both your own business and other services that you can offer, such as freelance services for other businesses. 

Pro’s:

• You can determine the digital strategy yourself
• Everything you learn you can use for other business opportunities too
• Being able to adapt quickly when there is a new development in the search landscape

Cons:

• It takes a lot of time to train yourself to become an expert
• Search marketers often decide to develop themselves in organic or paid advertising, which sometimes forces you to use an external service
• You have less time left to focus on other aspects of your business

Tip: A very insightful blog (NL) about growing organically is YellowBlueMarketing.

Work with a freelancer

There are many specialists available to help you with digital marketing. Many of these specialists have gained knowledge through their own training or at a digital marketing agency. 

Pro’s:

• Direct contact and involvement because you work with 1 person
• Freelancers are more willing to negotiate about their pricing
• They have several years of experience and practiced with different strategies

Cons:

• May not have the knowhow of your industry, this can have a negative effect on strategy and in following new trends
• You have no insight into the number of hours the freelancer spends on your business. While you do pay for a set amount of hours.
• A freelancer often has 1 expertise. If you want to start with a new traffic source, like paid advertising, you will need to hire an additional specialist

Hire a digital marketing agency

When you are looking for digital marketing knowledge you quickly end up with an agency. It is the traditional way of bringing in external knowledge to increase your company's visibility online.

Pro’s

• An agency has different fields of expertise in-house. This enables you to quickly scale to other traffic sources
• A lot of knowledge is shared internally. You also benefit from this by staying up to date with trends in search.
• If your contact person or account manager drops out for any reason, there will be someone else to advise you.

Cons

• You have no insight into how many hours the agency spends on you. This is also seen as a black box
• Staff changes happen a lot at agencies. On average, every two years a marketer leaves an agency. This means your trusted contact, who knows your company, changes quite often.
• There is often a lack of real knowledge about the (niche) industry in which you operate

The use of smart software

These days software is at the core of defining a digital marketing strategy. Both beginners and experts use software to make better choices with better insights and save time while defining their strategy.

Pro’s

• By processing large amounts of data within minutes, software is able to provide the bigger picture
• You can easily scale to new markets
• Saves a lot of time and is therefore very cost effective. Software provides insights within minutes that could take you several hours to complete manually

Cons

• Taking the next step after gaining data-driven insights can be complex without having the right knowledge
• You can quickly lose the overview in all the data that is handed to you
• Standard business processes need to be changed in order to use software effectively

Can you do digital marketing yourself?

The short answer: yes, of course. By doing your own digital marketing you stay in control of your business. You can decide what strategy to implement, switch quickly when trends change and you are in control of your budget. You know exactly how many hours you spend on what - you can learn from this to spend your time better where necessary.

The challenge lies in constantly staying up to date with new developments within digital marketing. Technology moves at a tremendous pace. Possibly digital marketing isn't the only thing you're involved in. You want to stay ahead of your competition in order to gain those valuable clicks. 

Do not forget to keep your content up to date. Relevant content written from an expert point of view together with the right website structure is important to Google. Following Google’s guidelines will help you with more visitors, revenue or downloads. But how do you know what to write about? Is there a lot of competition for this topic? When to take the right actions to  become relevant in the search engine? How is your website performing after all the new content you have produced?

How software helps with digital marketing

Whether you're a specialist or a beginner, software helps you make better choices and save time. Do you hire a freelancer or agency? They use software to determine your strategy. Smart software solutions are here to stay in digital marketing. Smart software, which distinguishes itself from software by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, enables you as a user to make choices based on large data sets. These smart solutions provide insight into how people search in the search engine, with what intention they search, how many people search for a topic and many other things.

Automating tasks plays an important role in optimising work processes. The goal of using software is to make your life a lot easier. You will be much more flexible with all the time left - time you can use for other tasks to grow your business.

Smart software continues to learn over time and becomes smarter by the day. The software gets smarter by analysing huge data sets and through training of the algorithms. By doing this, smart software is able to give better insights, advice or even tasks.

With the wide range of software solutions available, it's hard to choose where to start. Before you know it, you have one software for your organic traffic and another for paid traffic that breaks down in costs per country or project. Then you have to decide which source you trust the most for your analysis. Or use Excel as a plan B to combine data sources in to 1 overview.

The digital marketing assistant

KeyWI is the first smart software solution that gives you weekly data-driven growth advice to reach your ideal target audience. By generating weekly digital marketing tasks, you know exactly when to do what to grow your business.

What you may not know is that KeyWI started out as an organic traffic specialist software, also known as SEO software. KeyWI was a smart keyword research software that provides insight into which keywords are related according to the search engine, with what intent people are searching, who the competition is, where you are currently performing, how many people are searching and where you can improve compared to the competition. This version of KeyWI for keyword research is in combination with your Google Ads, Google Search Console, Google Analytics and business goals the engine of generating smart tasks. 

You hire external services when you don't have the knowledge yourself. KeyWI makes sure that you have the knowledge in-house. Choose a task and follow the steps described in the task.  Different tasks that follow on a weekly basis can include:

• Create a new page for a topic
• Optimise an existing page
• Link page A and B together
• Start a paid campaign

These tasks are presented in the dashboard as follows:

The tasks can be simply assigned to a team member. Keep the overview and monitor the progress of your team:

Have you ever dreamed of scaling into a new market? KeyWI can handle any language and location by analysing the keywords and opportunities in the local market. Important factors such as interpretation of language or industry knowledge is no longer a concern because KeyWI looks at local data sources.

After completing a task, KeyWI continues to measure the results. By continuing to measure results, KeyWI sees where you are growing but also where you are not. KeyWI learns from your results and is able to generate better tasks over time. In addition, the Analytics section provides insight into the performance of your website. All the linked data sources come together in one Analytics dashboard. You will always have access to historical data in order to present results both internally and externally.

Are you curious about how to stay in control of your growth and budget without compromising on quality? Then start with KeyWI for free via the Free plan or get access to a larger search landscape with more tasks via one of the paid packages. Do you have any other questions? Feel free to get in touch with us here.